Pumpktris is Tetris in a pumpkin

Out of the hundreds of classic arcade games that we remember playing growing up, Tetris is just one of them. It’s a game that takes skill and strategy, as well as the ability to make decisions quickly. One man was determined enough to embed the classic title into a real pumpkin, and he calls it Pumpktris.

Just in time for Halloween tomorrow, the Pumpktris can play Tetris like any other game device would. It comes with a matrix of 128 LEDs to act as the display of sorts (16×8 LED array), and the pumpkin stem acts as the joystick to move and rotate the falling Tetrominoes. Then, some coding was done to get the game working, and the pumpkin was carved out to make room for the LED matrix and the circuitry.

Coding the game actually doesn’t seem all too difficult when the creator explains it. Tetris has seven Tetrominoes that each have four blocks (as implied by the numerical prefix “tetra”). A three-dimensional array stores the location of every pixel of every shape, in each of the four positions of each Tetromino. It might sound confusing and time-consuming, but each of the seven Tetrominoes takes up only six lines of code.

In total, 128 LEDs were used, as well as 256 pieces of heat-shrink tubing with 313 solder joints. The builder of Pumpktris said it took him around 12 hours of work spanned over a week and a half, but he got it done in time for the Halloween parties that occurred this past weekend. The high score so far on Pumpktris is 9,800.